If you find a live link, enter it in the above field. If you do not, leave the field empty.

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If you find a ''live link to a finding aid,'' enter it in the above field. If you do not, leave the field empty. NOTE: If inputting the collection number to Acumen gets you something, but it's not a finding aid, it's probably a default link to ''the very xml you're trying to create.'' Which means it's already in Acumen, and you don't need to make it. Do not put this link in the Finding Aid Link field.

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If you did not find a Manuscript Number in the spreadsheet, but you do find a finding aid online, look for this number. When possible, use 4 digits for the MSS number, left-padding with zeros so that MSS 14 would be written MSS 0014. Always give the Manuscript Number in this format: MSS 1632

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If you did not find a Manuscript Number in the spreadsheet, but you do find a finding aid online, look for this number. If possible, use 4 digits for the MS number, left-padding with zeros so that MS 14 would be written MS 0014. Always give the Manuscript Number in this format: MS 1632

Alternative forms the Manuscript number may currently have, in the filename or elsewhere:

Alternative forms the Manuscript number may currently have, in the filename or elsewhere:

Revision as of 08:41, 25 October 2012

If you are the first person to work on a manuscript collection, you should create an xml file (using the 'Notepad' program on the PC; or 'TextEdit' on the Mac, saving as ANSI/ASCII text on Windows and as UTF-8 on the Mac) that contains the following information, in this order and using the following template, with no carriage returns (newlines) or formatting within any element.

Please make sure that all encoding saved in these files (like the tab-delimited files from the Excel exports) is either ANSI ASCII, or UTF-8. That means, if any Word or PDF content was cut and pasted and transferred into these files – overwrite all the quotes, hyphens, apostrophes, and non-keyboard encodings with plain text or UTF-8 unicode. Otherwise they’ll be garbage. In addition, if you MUST use “&”, encode it as &amp; so it won’t break the xml.

Save the file in the Admin folder for the collection, naming it for the collection itself. Thus, u0003_0000252.xml for the Cabaniss papers.

If more than one digital collection is created for a given analog collection, distinguish following collection file names sequentially as if they are pages. That is, if we return to the Cabaniss Papers and digitize some descriptions of tigers in Africa, the collection xml file for this second set of content would be saved as u0002_0000252_002.xml, and the original xml file should have "_001" appended onto the name prior to the xml prefix, as at that point, u0002_0000252.xml becomes the first in a sequence (u0003_0000252_001.xml), rather than a representation of the complete analog collection.

Step by step instructions:

This section describes how to make Collection Information XML files from "scratch" using the file:
S:\Digital Projects\Organization\Digital Program\Selection.xlsx.
In general, however, most of the the values such as Digital Collection Name, etc. are already in the Descriptive Metadata spreadsheets handed to us by the archivists
as well as the TrackingFilenames spreadsheet.
That is to say that most of the work in determining such values is already done by the Archivists.
See this page for information on matching values across documents.

All of this information should be available from the S:\Digital Projects\Organization\Digital Program\Selection.xlsx which was filled in by the archivists.

If this information is not available in the given spreadsheet, please contact the archivists to ask for it.

NOTE! This value -- exactly! -- must be entered in the digital collection column of the metadata spreadsheet for each object, so that we can retrieve all the contents of a collection with a search.

<Alphabetized_By>Enter value from "Alphabetize" column</Alphabetized_By>IF THIS VALUE IS NOT AVAILABLE, enter what makes sense. This is NOT an optional field! It determines how things appear on our collections page.

DO NOT precede the value in the "Alphabetized By" element with "a", "an", or "the". We don't want to sort things by definite or indefinite articles.

*Note that the acceptable types are these: book, image, text, audio, video, mixed media, finding aid, score, other
This value determines what icon will be displayed, if we do NOT have one for this collection -- so choose wisely. Sheet music should be "score" -- most manuscript content should be "text".

If you find a live link to a finding aid, enter it in the above field. If you do not, leave the field empty. NOTE: If inputting the collection number to Acumen gets you something, but it's not a finding aid, it's probably a default link to the very xml you're trying to create. Which means it's already in Acumen, and you don't need to make it. Do not put this link in the Finding Aid Link field.

If you did not find a Manuscript Number in the spreadsheet, but you do find a finding aid online, look for this number. If possible, use 4 digits for the MS number, left-padding with zeros so that MS 14 would be written MS 0014. Always give the Manuscript Number in this format: MS 1632

Alternative forms the Manuscript number may currently have, in the filename or elsewhere:

<Digital_Collection_Description>Materials from the papers of this nineteenth-century Madison County, Alabama, attorney who drafted a controversial will for wealthy planter Samuel Townsend which manumitted certain slaves and designated them as Townsend's primary heirs. Selected items include Townsend's will, a deposition given by S.D. Cabaniss concerning his role in the estate, and a report by Rev. William D. Chadick discussing the prospect of settling the newly-manumitted Townsend heirs in Ohio.</Digital_Collection_Description>